Archive for the ‘software’ Category
Wordle
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
Wordle
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
This looks interesting the I find the whole area of visualisations very interesting with much to discover of their uses as a learning tool.
Really pleased with this wordle of this blog!
This is the wordle of the Harnessing Technology Report
Web ct vista “Victory” evaluation
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008Note all comments refer to a specific installation of Web CT Vista, known as Victory at the University of Portsmouth and should not be taken to indicate performance of any other Web CT Vista installation. Although none of the issues I mention are unfamiliar if you check out the discussion boards at web ct.
Been pondering on our experience so far of Victory as you do when you should be doing something else.
Prompted somewhat by Terry’s note to the effect that Victory was an improvement on Web CT. I am not sure it is from the students side of the fence, so attempting to arrange a visit to the ” other side” to see what I can see.
But time to jot down some sort of overview of the “issues” it occurred to me. I have been blogging and posting widely to the effect that Moodle is far and away easier to use, and admin that I can’t see how Web CT and other such VLE’s can survive. Then I found I was not the only person to come to this conclusion and in the same words nearly.
Athabasca University
CENTRE FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION
Online Software Evaluation Report
TITLE : WebCT: a major shift of emphasis
REPORT # : R41/0410
AUTHOR(S) : Barbara Morningstar, Jeremy Schubert & Kristine Thibeault
DATE : October 2004
available http://cde.athabascau.ca/softeval/reports/R4104102.pdf
Accessed 22nd April 2008
From the abstract
The review compares the existing WebCT Campus Edition with the new WebCT Vista, and examines some of the problems associated with the migration to Vista at the institutional level. A
response to the report by the WebCT company is appended.
With so many comparable
open source softwares emerging for course management, containing more varied features than WebCT,
one has to wonder: how long can such costly proprietary products survive?Postscript. I happen to know that they are now using Moodle as a work collegue is a student there and mentioned the fact to me this very day. She attended my last training day for Moodle, and had noticed Athabasca staff were about to attend a similar training day over in Canada.
Anyway to the issues in hand.
What are the usability issues that we had with the old Web CT? seems so long ago now I will go and retrieve them and make comparisons. A quick canter back to web ct reveals a catalogue of issues but not many with web ct itself. I recall we criticised it in comparison with other web 2.0 tools as lacking functionality, however it did seem to be a stable functional platform.
What are the issues that we are experiencing now in Vista?
Who is online- a good idea in principle and one of the features I was most looking forward to trying out having been used to having multiple windows open to run MSN alongside other apps while working and chatting to other course members.
We found initially that on sending a chat invite to other course members who were on line they were not alerted in any visible way to the invitation so tended to log out before responding. Some students found it did not work at all, (possible issues with pop ups and Java versions which are affecting overall performance). When it did work, from time to time it shuts down and throws the occupants of that chat session out. This is general issue in Victory, from time to time an attempt to upload a file or open a post will throw you out of the VLE.
Assignments area- I have documented the difficulties here in detail in previous posts.
Html editor- having worked almost the whole semester without this function. It has been a lot like watching black and white tv! Since I became a lurker on the web ct message boards picked up some solutions to test which worked. I posted the following in technicolour following my first sucessful use of the html editor.
Tip 1 Make sure you only have one version of Java installed, go to control panel, add remove programs and check. It seems that Java does not remove old files when it updates, which is currently every few weeks, so you may find you have some old version accumulated since your last clear out, I found one.
Tip 2 go to control panel and look for an icon for Java. Click on the icon and look at the general tab, go to temporary Internet files and delete files.
I suspect this may have to be repeated from time to time for optimum performance. Well a bit late in the day but some progress for me, its been a very dull semester posting in boring type.
The whiteboard.- now this again looked like it had potential, but in practice does not work very well. Uploaded files come out very pixely and you can only use jpg, gif and some unique whiteboard format. Writing on the whiteboard seems easier now I have cleared out the Java cache but is still not easy.
Everything else seems pretty much the same as the old web ct, granted the look is a tad more modern.
Some benfits- editing of posts after posting. This is a real boon for many reasons, not the least my habit of rambling on, can go back and shorten posts!
I will add further benfits as I think of them!
